Is the coronavirus the end of the world as we know it? I was always told the world was going to end. In 1971, when I was a kid, George, the leader of the cult in which I grew up in New Hampshire,...

Anyone who has ever stood in a long line at an airport can sympathize with the plight of the travelers returning from abroad, when they found themselves waiting for hours to enter their homeland....

This is the first of a series of essays on the pandemic, the rest of which will appear regularly in The Philosophical Salon, edited by Michael Marder. ¤ With the new coronavirus pandemic, the sense...

Learning how to breathe

My cohort of over-65 people are supposed to be enjoying the new Age of Longevity. But do some younger people still associate us older folks with dying — however unconsciously — so that our premature...

On March 15, 2020, the University of New Mexico Press released my A Hundred Little Pieces on the End of the World, a collection of essays contemplating the collapse of industrial civilization. In the...

When coronavirus became a thing, I remember thinking first, narcissistically, Oh, f**k, here come the racist taunts and slurs. My hindsight was not, in this case, 20/20. I did not expect the “Yellow...

Today […] as never before, a sound immigration and naturalization system is essential to the preservation of our way of life, because that system is the conduit through which a stream of humanity...

In Jose Saramago’s novel Blindness, a pandemic sweeping the globe deprives people of sight. It simply happens; no explanation is given. Not unexpectedly, the response is absolute and unmitigated...

On March 13, after three months in Spain on a seven-month Fulbright scholarship, I was informed by the Spanish Fulbright Commission that the State Department was urgently advising Fulbright scholars...

My mother said her meds made her fat. She’d only take them when she thought she was about to die, unable to breathe, constricted as if her ribs had grown and interlocked across her chest. Only then...

On Friday, March 20, I called my father to congratulate him on the Persian New Year. It felt gloomy, to put it mildly. We used to do it in person, shaking hands, hugging, and the three traditional...

I can’t remember why or when my friend John and I began sending each other news reports of animal attacks. I think it was a few weeks after I moved to Wyoming to teach literature at the university....

I have spent the past decade studying the cholera wedding, a magical ritual that the Jews of Eastern Europe devised to ward off epidemics in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The rite...

It is of course a function of my rather narrow social class that the Decameron has become suddenly present. But even if the uptick in its popularity remains somewhat niche, it is not any mystery....

In 1755, an earthquake laid the city of Lisbon to waste. Three shocks toppled most of the Portuguese capital’s buildings. Dust rose up and covered the sky. A series of tsunamis collided with the city...

Isolating for a month now, to the day, 200 miles north of New York City, where the deaths mount. Here we see no one. North of here, all the way to the Canadian border, there are no deaths. Yet. In...

Some compulsion is leading very intelligent people to claim that they have identified the parables or texts that diagnose our experience of COVID-19 or the history that has led us here. Albert Camus,...

Just as the film Contagion has found a second life with news of the coronavirus outbreak, so too are novels about epidemics popping up on reading lists around the country.  — Tobias Carroll, “Pande...

When I woke up yesterday, a lamp caught on fire. It was early morning; I was up just a few minutes before my first Zoom meeting of the day and was turning on the lights in my living room while the...

“Generals always prepare to fight the last war” is a common military adage, invoked to remind leaders to plan for the future. Currently, we are immersed in what could be described as World War III....

Probably the single most sinister term in the Nazi lexicon was lebensunwertes Leben, “life unworthy of life.” It was the label worn by the hundreds of thousands of little children and adults murdered...

I. The whole world seems to be on pause. Cars parked, aircrafts on the ground, conferences on hold, shops closed, recruitment paused, people stuck in their homes (those who do have homes, that is)....